Jennifer Tilly Wins Poker Tournament

Celebrity Autographs And Celebrity Addresses

LOS ANGELES -
Jennifer Tilly has won her second major poker tournament, and confidence in her playing ability.

"I felt like I was suffering from the 'impostor syndrome,'" said Tilly, who jumped from the table after her win. "I had these niggling self doubts. But now I know I can really play. These women were extremely tough pros with blood lust at the poker table."

Tilly's victory at the World Poker Tour Ladies Night III at the Bicycle Casino on Thursday makes her the first woman to win that title and the
World Series' Ladies World Poker Championship held in June.

The win guaranteed her a spot in the $25,000 buy-in WPT Championship in April at Bellagio.

The actress, an Oscar nominee for her role in the 1994 film "Bullets Over Broadway," has been playing the game for a year. She said she learned pointers from her boyfriend, poker player Phil "Unabomber" Laak.

One reason to say yes to lap dancing..

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - An angry San Diego topless dancer pulled out a knife and stabbed a customer after he refused a lap dance, police said on Thursday.

Lawanda Dixon, 24, was arrested for assault with a deadly weapon shortly after the altercation with 33-year-old Melik Jordan at the Dream Girls Cabaret early on Wednesday, San Diego police Det. Gary Hassen said.

"He was in the club with some friends watching the shows when she came up and asked if he wanted a lap dance," Hassen said. "He said no, she got upset about it, they argued back and forth. She pulled knife out of her bag and stabbed him."

Dixon was taken into custody and police found methamphetamine in a small metal container in Dixon's bag, Hassen said, adding that she may face drug charges. Officers also confiscated a small folding knife.

Jordan was treated for his injuries and released by a local hospital.

Sex On The Beach

A guy is walking along the beach, when he meets a girl with no legs, crying.
"Why are you crying?" he asks.

"I've never been hugged," she says. The guy hugs her, but she continues crying.

"Why are you crying?" he asks.

"I've never been kissed," she says. The guy kisses her, but she continues crying.

"Why are you crying?" he asks.

"I've never been screwed," she says. The guy picks her up and throws her into the water.

"There," he says. "Now you're screwed."

Silver Netizens Now More Active on Online Dating Sites in the U.S.

Dennis Barton (62), a retiree, and Marge Roberts (57), a science writer, have been going out for about a year. Both of their marriages ended in divorce 25 years ago, and both have stayed single since then. They feel that they finally found each other as “soul mates.” Roberts looks forward to dinner every Tuesday with Barton.

The couple lives in Cincinnati, but they were not first introduced to each other by a relative or a neighbor. Barton saw Roberts’ profile on Yahoo! Personals and sent her an e-mail. That is why Roberts refers to Barton as a “Yahoo! boy.”

According to the August 31 issue of USA Today, an increasing number of those in their 50s are “online dating” just like Barton and Roberts. The paper quoted an expert and added that it is rapidly growing among the 50-plus online dating market and making inroads into the 60s.

In January, 4.8 million, or 18.5 percent, of the 26 million American visitors to online dating sites were 55 years old and older.

For Date.com, membership registration aged 65 and older soared 78.5 percent in a year since January 2004. In January, Match.com was visited by 704,000, all of whom were 55 or older, an increase of 98,000 over the past year.

The paper cited more divorces and others for the reason of a larger number of older singles. Many of them want to look for dates, and the first thing they do is go online. They are familiar with computer and the Internet. It is no longer a silly idea for older singles to log on to dating websites.

Alan Coleman (55), a single retired teacher, said, “Older people have more wisdom and better judgment. We are better-suited for online dating.”

Men Aren't Going Extinct

NEW YORK - Good news for men: The male sex chromosome isn't going extinct anytime soon. Researchers have found, contrary to the popular notion, that the male Y chromosome is not gradually decaying away.

In recent years, researchers have theorized that the male sex chromosome is heading for extinction over the next few million years. Unlike other chromosomes, the Y chromosome has no partner with which to swap genes when one gets damaged. The Y contains a wimpy 27 genes (versus 1,000 or so for the X chromosome), and has shed the vast majority of its genes since it diverged from ancestor chromosomes roughly 300 million years ago. It has been likened to a genetic wasteland.

But now researchers at the MIT-affiliated Whitehead Institute have compared the human Y chromosome to the chimpanzee counterpart, searching for genes that men may have lost or degraded since humankind diverged from chimps six million years ago. To their relief, they found not a single gene has been lost in that long period, indicating that the Y isn't falling after all.

By contrast, the researchers found that the chimpanzee male chromosome has lost five genes over the last six million years, which may be due to chimps' promiscuous sexual habits, the researchers theorized. Men have one X and one Y chromosome, while women have two X chromosomes.

"Somehow this idea...that the Y chromosome is headed for extinction...has achieved tremendous market penetration," says Whitehead geneticist David Page, the senior author of the study. "But despite all the doomsday scenarios, it actually looks like the Y is sailing along quite nicely. It has established a new lifestyle with fewer genes. Our species has a long to-do list, but I think we can cross this problem off the list. You can sleep a little better now."

The sex chromosome work is being published this week in the British journal Nature as part of a package of articles on the sequencing of the chimpanzee genome.

In several other articles, researchers from the University of Washington and elsewhere searched for key genetic differences that could help explain what makes us human. Overall, the researchers found that human and chimps were 98.8% genetically identical, with a mere 35 million chemical letters that differ between the chimp and human books of life. By another measure, searching through larger sections of DNA for whole sentences that are copied or deleted, the researchers found a slightly larger 2.7% variation between the two species.

"The chimp data allows us to provide a comprehensive catalog of all the variations between chimp and human," says University of Washington geneticist Evan Eichler. This data will help to narrow down to the minority of changes crucial to our human-ness.

Still, after all this work, researchers are only at the very earliest stages of figuring out why we are so much smarter than monkeys.

"The original idea was by comparing [chimps' genes]with the human genome we would discover why we write poetry or become reporters. Sadly today we can say almost nothing about that topic that we couldn't say before the chimp genome was done," says Whitehead Institute's Page. "We genomicists can pile up the DNA letters very quickly but are very primitive readers of the text. It is an overstatement to say we can read it at the first grade level."

The chimpanzee genome data provides another possible tool for companies mining gene data for key disease causing genes and genetic variations, although the mouse genome and other model systems such as tiny roundworms are likely to remain mainstays for this sort of work.

Companies known for their gene work include Celera Genomics Group and Human Genome Sciences (nasdaq: HGSI - news - people ). Big drug companies, including Merck (nyse: MRK - news - people ) and Pfizer (nyse: PFE - news - people ) and GlaxoSmithKline (nyse: GSK - news - people ) have also invested heavily in newfangled gene research over the years.